Contemporary South Asia ISSN: 0958-4935 (Print) 1469-364X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccsa20 Cultural identity and beef festivals: toward a ‘multiculturalism against caste’ Balmurli Natrajan To cite this article: Balmurli Natrajan (2018): Cultural identity and beef festivals: toward a ‘multiculturalism against caste’, Contemporary South Asia, DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2018.1504000 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2018.1504000 Published online: 25 Jul 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccsa20 Contemporary South Asia, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2018.1504000 Cultural identity and beef festivals: toward a ‘multiculturalism against caste’ Balmurli Natrajan* Anthropology, William Paterson University of New Jersey, Wayne, USA (Received 26 September 2017; accepted 4 May 2018) Beef festivals are a dramatic and visible form of protest against the Indian government’s ban on beef. These festivals are framed popularly as an assertion of Dalit ‘cultural rights’ and identity, with beef represented as the cultural food of Dalits. While it is clear that the beef ban is a casteist ban based on a Brahmanical food hierarchy, this paper explores the limits of resisting casteism through the assertion of caste-based cultural rights and identities, or as an assertion of an individual right to food choice. It argues that such a politics of resisting casteism runs into problems of the culturalization of caste, and limits the kinds of radical Dalit subjects and actors who could emerge as liberatory political subjects. The paper calls for reframing beef festivals as ‘antagonistic’ moments that articulate the degradation of Dalit labor in the politics of beef, reassert Dalit identity as an anti-caste identity rather than a cultural caste identity, and herald a politics of ‘multiculturalism against caste’. Keywords: beef; Dalit; anti-casteism; cultural identity; culturalization Introduction: a political puzzle and a culture trap Restrictions on cow slaughter have existed since the adoption of the Indian Constitution in 1950. Article 48 of the Indian Constitution is a directive to individual states to be ‘protectors of cows.’ Since 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of Hindutva (or Hindu supremacist ultranationalism), has introduced stringent state and national level legislation seeking to ban the slaughter of all bovines, the consumption of beef, its possession and transportation, and the sale of cows for slaughter. These ‘beef bans’ are frequently justified by votaries, including political leaders and ‘cow vigilantes’1 as representing, protecting and promoting the ‘culture’ of Hindus, and of India which is claimed to be essentially a ‘Hindu nation’ (Chigateri 2011; Punwani 2015; Jaffrelot 2017). Beef bans have been resisted most dramatically through ‘beef festivals’ organized in different parts of India, on campuses by university students, and in public spaces in cities by political parties. Dalits (especially students) have been at the forefront of organiz- ing beef festivals as counter-hegemonic discourse (Garalyte 2015; Gundimeda 2009; Patha- nia 2016). Beef festivals are thus arguably part of a long history of resistance to casteism, including the attempt to re-appropriate historically stigmatized cultural symbols (Arun 2007; Gorringe 2016). Frequently, organizers and participants (Dalits and non-Dalits) in *Email: [email protected] © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 B. Natrajan beef festivals represent beef festivals as assertions of Dalit ‘cultural rights’ against casteist humiliation, with beef being articulated as part of the ‘food culture’ or as ‘cultural food’ of Dalit groups (Thomas 2011). Claims to ‘culture’, identity, and ‘community’ are thus central to political action, not only of authoritarian populist states and their foot soldiers, but also of protesting social groups. Having come to occupy a central place in Indian politics today, Dalit politics demands serious attention, especially in its choice of the forms and idioms of resistance. Yet, the salience of the concept ‘culture’ for a liberatory politics of caste remains unclear. What kind of radical democratic politics do struggles such as beef festivals advance? What historical subject and actor do beef festivals enable? Let us begin with a political puzzle. In a remarkable presaging of extant beef politics, political scientist Kancha Ilaiah, a long-time formidable opponent of casteism, argued more than two decades ago: If beef is banned in India that will be the beginning of the end of our multiculturalism. Cultural plurality has been the essence of Indian society … The very caste system synthesised multicul- turality in India right from ancient days. The attempt to homogenise India’s cultural and legal practices is a dangerous trend. (1996, 1445; emphasis mine) Ilaiah’s warnings and arguments show remarkable prescience about beef bans. However, it brings into relief a puzzle. If, as Ilaiah argues, the caste system in ancient India ‘synthesized multiculturality,’ and hence is the author of India’s ‘cultural plurality,’ then do we need to defend and protect the caste system in order to value plurality and diversity? It throws up a puzzle: Is Indian pluralism a ‘multiculturalism of castes’ wherein each caste’s ‘culture’ contributes to the country’s diversity? To affirm this would of course run contrary to the long-standing anti-caste character of Ilaiah’s writings, analyses and politics. Such a ‘multiculturalism of castes’ is deeply problematic. It makes casteism appear benign by rendering the ‘culture’ of castes innocent. Caste discrimination appears then as cultural discrimination, and caste conflicts as cultural (or identitarian) conflicts. Caste itself then becomes a problem for the ‘management of diversity’, rather than being viewed as a sociopolitical problem. Our political puzzle thus offers a secondary set of ques- tions to explore. Is it possible to resist casteism by appealing to the ‘cultural rights’ of castes?2 More fundamentally, are caste groups cultural groups, i.e. are castes really distin- guished by their ‘culture’, and hence do caste groups have ‘cultural rights?’ What then are the liberatory potentials of claiming a stigmatized food as a part of Dalit ‘cultural identity’? The puzzle emerges from the way Ilaiah traverses the slippery slope from caste to culture in his essay. While he initially rightly speaks about the need to view beef as ‘people’s food’ due to its cheap availability and high protein content, he quickly slips into portraying beef as the food of particular castes. Hence, he ends by arguing that ‘no caste can ban the food of another caste’ (1445). Beef thus gains its status in Ilaiah’s analysis as a contributor to India’s cultural diversity, being the ‘cultural food’ of Dalits, referenced above as a caste group with cultural rights. Ilaiah’s logic, which leads to the puzzle, assumes that caste difference is cultural difference. It is therefore compelled to valorize caste iden- tities as contributing to cultural diversity. In doing so, it elides the fact that the caste system has historically required, and continues to actively demand and indeed produce, ‘culture’ as a mark of caste ‘difference’ for its own reproduction and legitimation. In other words, cas- teism demands cultural difference. Elsewhere I have shown how a multiculturalist logic legitimizes caste and casteism, precisely by enabling castes to parade as ‘cultural’ differ- ence, a process that I call the ‘culturalization of caste’ (Natrajan 2012a).3 I argue that Contemporary South Asia 3 casteism demands and produces the ‘culture’ of particular castes as a necessary part of its own need to differentiate (hence produce discrete ‘castes’), dominate (by hierarchizing ‘difference’), and legitimize itself (by appealing to multiculturalism). The ‘culturalization of caste’ is a key mode of legitimizing caste today. It occurs whenever caste seeks to pass off as ‘culture’, when caste hierarchy masks itself as benign ‘cultural difference’, and caste identity asserts itself as ‘cultural’ identity.4 Beef festivals, at least those that frame themselves entirely around an assertion of beef- eating as Dalit cultural identity and rights, thus risk falling into a ‘culture trap’–a trap that results from the misrecognition of a key process of the legitimization of caste today – the ‘culturalization of caste’. Whereas we seemingly encounter empirically ‘different’ practices between castes in terms of (say) food, dress, music, marital customs, speech or jokes, any analysis which takes these ‘differences’ as the reason why different castes exist and as an unproblematic basis for their separate ‘cultural’ identities, fails to account for the pro- duction of these differences. It simply accepts what needs to be explained – the appearance of ‘difference’, its representation as ‘cultural’ identity, and its claim (by social actors) as undergirding ‘caste identity.’ In another essay, I contended that beef festivals were (best viewed as) ‘a caste war on cultural grounds; not a cultural war on caste grounds’ (Natrajan 2012b, 57, fn 19). I further noted that we need a ‘caste conscious, multicaste, anti-caste for- mation’ in order to combat caste. In this paper, I build upon these earlier formulations as part of a sympathetic critique of beef festivals, sharing Ilaiah’s